Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. Traditionally we take stock of the things that we're thankful for on this day each year. And I realized that one of those things is Steve Jobs . I'm thankful that he returned to Apple in 1997 and did the things he has done since. It wasn't at all a certainty that he would ever return to the company that he cofounded two decades earlier. In fact, it was only luck and coincidence that pushed him back there. It was late December 1996. I was an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati , the largest and most well known law firm in Silicon Valley. I'd fought for my job there, and I was lucky to be in a small group of lawyers that worked on some of the hottest deals at the firm - Netscape public financings and acquisitions, Pixar's corporate deals with Disney, and NeXT Software, among others. Steve Jobs ran Pixar and NeXT, and whenever he did something that needed a law firm, he called my boss. Well, my boss' boss - Larry Sonsini .